So Why Read Anymore?

Victor Davis Hanson: So Why Read Anymore?

By nature, our ways of expression and even thinking always fossilize and are withering away with age and monotony — a process accelerated by the modern electronic age and the neglect of replenishment through reading. The actual vocabulary of our present youth seems to me reduced to about 1,000 words or so. “Like,” “whatever,” “you know,” “cool,” and other pop culture fillers now substitute for entire phrases, a sort of modern porcine grunting. The Greeks used particles to accentuate vocabulary and guide syntax; we used them instead of vocabulary. Our syntax, both written and oral, is reverting to “Spot is a dog”: noun, verb, predicate — period. How did incomprehensible slang, spiced with vulgarity, become an object of emulation? I used to listen to farmers without college degrees speak wonderful English; now to listen to a member of Congress almost requires a translator.

Reading alone enriches our vocabulary; it teaches us that good writing requires a sense of melody as well as a command of grammar. Soon those well-read become the well-spoken.

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A Downright Mean Job

A Downright Mean Job - Victor Davis Hanson looks at a piece in the NY Times which sympathetically examines the "plight" of the former or soon-to-be-former members of the Obama administration...

Yesterday, the New York Times had a puff piece on the “exhausting” nature of White House work, pegged to the recent wave of administration departures...The Times wants to draw a sympathetic portrait of the heroic Obama cadre that suffers so much on our behalf. These are six-figure jobs that wear out one’s hands on the Blackberry, true, but serve as valuable stepping-stones to even higher-paying corporate jobs. And this is still a recession. This raise-the-bar griping will not go down well with the coal worker in Montana, the welder on a 30-story scaffold, or the oil worker offshore.

Of course, it's not like any of those people are in the NY Times target audience. The New York Times audience is Manhattan liberals and media members around the country, whose hands get dirty in the normal course of their day only if the ink on the Times isn't quite dry yet. Workers in real jobs would obviously just laugh at the travails of the stressed Obama-ites, but how many of them are going to read that piece? In the world of the NY Times and its audience, that's hard-hitting, important journalism on one of the major issues of the day...



(H/T: Instapundit)